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becoming a quant

Nick Papanikolaou

Joined
6/29/12
Messages
3
Points
11
hi everyone i am currently finishing my studies in accounting and finance with focus on finance but during the last year i searched about financial engineering and intrigued me.In the last year i found that risk management and derivatives pricing are the areas i want to pursue a career.As i have seen in order to be offered a place in decent mfe courses strong mathematical background is needed and many quants now working were phd students in math or physics.Although i attended every single quantitative track in my degree( statistics, basic mathematics, financial modelling with excel , computational finance,alternative investments) i dont know what should i do..
thanks in advance
 
ok thnx for the advice..i will also look for preparatory courses in order to enrich my cv
what do you think about cqf??
 
I don't know much about the CQF but I was under the impression that you got a CQF to avoid getting an MFE usually if you were already in the industry. The CQF is cheaper than any MFE probably, but it's not that cheap to just pick up if you're also expecting to pay for the MFE too (and I would expect it would be time consuming as well).

Your background in Finance is good in that it shows you have an interest for the industry but if you're missing so many of the prerequisites that you can't take first semester classes, it doesn't make sense for a program to bring you on.

What I would do if I were you is find a relevant or semi-relevant job now, look up your target school's prerequisites and take the ones you are missing part-time. Provided you do well, I think you would be competitive given that you've shown you can do the math plus have a finance degree. At Rutgers, the prerequisites are five semesters of calculus, linear algebra, calculus based probability and a good CS 101 type course. Of the eight courses, I took five part-time while working.

It's actually pretty hard to teach yourself the material from these sort of foundation courses (at least I thought so) and I would imagine it would be hard for someone reviewing your app to take it on faith that you would pick it up with no formal coursework.
 
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